Holding our concepts and views about ourselves lightly:
Without abiding anywhere,
let the mind come forth
The Diamond Sutra
Sunday Quote: Non-abiding
Tag: mind
Continual practice
In Japan, cleaning is called “Soji” and valued as a way to cultivate our minds. Buddhist monks in a monastery put more time into practicing Soji than into practicing Zen meditation. A monk’s day begins with cleaning. We sweep the temple grounds and polish the temple building
One important thing Soji practice tells us is that we never complete cleaning. Just as leaves begin to fall after you sweep, desires begin to accumulate right after you refresh your mind. We continue cleaning the gloom in our hearts, knowing that we will never end it.
Shoukei Matsumoto, 1979 -, author of A Monk’s Guide to a Clean House and Mind
The mind is all stories
Dipa Ma taught that the mind is all stories, one after another, like nesting dolls. You open one, and another is inside. Open that one, and there is another story emerging. When you get to the last nesting doll, the smallest one, and open it, inside of it is – what? It’s empty, nothing there, and all around you are the empty shells of the stories of your life
Amy Schmidt, author, Dipa Ma: The Life and Legacy of a Buddhist Master
[Dipa Ma, 1911 – 1989 was an Indian meditation teacher of Theravada Buddhism, who had a big influence on early teachers in the Insight Meditation Society in Barre Massachusetts]
The familiar
Let go of the mind, the thousand blue
story fragments we tell ourselves
each day to keep the world underfoot.
If you can awaken
inside the familiar
and discover it strange
you need never leave home.
Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser, Braided Creek : A Conversation in Poetry
Knowing Eggs
Once, when I was in college, I wrote home complaining about the food, and my mother sent me a Julia Child cookbook. In the book was a section on dealing with eggs in which she said that the sign of a really good cook is knowing eggs. And so I took an egg out. You can watch an egg – you can learn certain things just by watching it, but you don’t learn very much. To learn about eggs you have to put them in a pan and try to make something out of them. If you do this long enough you begin to understand that there are variations in eggs, and there are certain ways that they react to heat and ways that they react to oil or butter or whatever. And so by actually working with the egg and trying to make something out of it, you really come to understand eggs.
And it’s the same with the mind: unless you actually try to make something out of the mind, try to get a mental state going and keep it going, you don’t really know your own mind. You don’t know the processes of cause and effect within the mind. There has to be a factor of actual participation in the process. That way you can understand it. This all comes down to being observant and developing a skill.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu, The Path of Concentration & Mindfulness
Sunday Quote: Constant practice
Your brain is not designed to make you happy.
That’s your job.
Tony Robbins
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